EMCrit Podcast 172a – The Mind Palace?

The mind palace, also known as the memory palace or the memory theatre, is something I want badly! Ever since I read the incredible book, the Art of Memory by Frances Yates, I have dreamed of building a mind palace. But in medicine, we should be able to externalize the palace–in fact, we must! The method of loci will not suffice.

Technology should surely have advanced to the point where this is simple–the programming requirements are trivial.

Factors

Storage

We need a place to store all of the literature, books, and internet posts/media we feel will be valuable. The storage must be durable (if an internet site goes down, the work remains). If we lose our paid access, we retain the full text of the literature.

Readability

The medium should allow comfortable reading of the literature, viewing of the media, etc.

Accessibility

Should be immediately accessible offline or online. Should be firewall resistant.

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Gregory Brown

If you come up with a mind palace like you discussed, let me know. Anymore, I try to save as much as I can on a flash drive. Some things I will save to my OneDrive folder. I use Microsoft Word, Evernote, and Endnote. If a website doesn’t offer an option to save as a PDF, I will copy and paste the document to Word with the URL at the bottom for future reference. I have tried to keep things organized, but this proves quite difficult with items saved in numerous locations. I am trying to be more diligent with the organization since I am a non-traditional student working towards medical school. I know the amount of information I try to store is only going to increase. Podcasts are a completely separate problem; the amount of space they require forces me to only keep a link and hope they aren’t removed.

Having been a Sherlock Holmes fan from an early age I too have been fascinated by the idea of a mind palace. Josh Foer’s book is interesting and I think one his major points is that it isn’t easy. Being able to memorize reams of information (and access it) is an active not a passive process. This is echoed in Maria Konnikova’s Mastermind:How to think like Sherlock Holmes. One of the best techniques I had heard of was from Dominic O’Brien, one of more prolific and well known mnemonists. He created his Mind Palace (using loci) and then mapped them in a level creator in Doom. Whenever he played a level he used it to reinforce his recall. For myself I find one of the best things to do is create a web of knowledge. So I’ll listen to a podcast then read the show notes, read the references and then read other blog posts around the same subject and then things start to stick. Going back to first principles a la Richard Feynman (see Cal Newport’s dissection – http://calnewport.com/blog/2015/11/25/the-feynman-notebook-method/ ) has always helped me – even if those first principles are wrong. Whilst Crashingpatient.com is an outstanding repository of… Read more »

Thanks for this post, really nice to see this out in the open. I’ve tried recommending this to trainees, but they generally think I’m insane. My mind palace has a brutally rudimentary format, perhaps more of a “mind bunker”: It consists of ~10,000 files in a single folder (including .html documents, images, .pdf files). The most important files are html documents which contains notes and are hyper-text linked to each other, creating an intra-net. There is an index as well which helps navigate through the files. The html files contain embedded graphics and links to .pdf articles within this folder. Editing this can be done with a basic html editor (I use seamonkey but there are a dozen that are similarly free and easy to use- essentially a word processor). To view it, the files can be downloaded to an iphone or any other device and the intra-net runs off of a file-manager type app (I like “files” by Olive Toast). This will run blazingly fast and directly off the device, without any need for internet connection. Not fancy, but it works. This format might be useful for someone without a lot of technical skill. It certainly has tons of… Read more »

v. nice! there are actually mac programs that will take rtf or markdown or html and make them into the backend of a constantly updated website without any programming knowledge at all. Also ones that will take text files kept in dropbox and do the same. Also will be updating with some recs from my name brother.

Remember when residents carried around those small notebooks supplied by drug rep that they filled with useful tools and sometimes random medical trivia just in case? Yeah that on steroids. This is the second time that Scott had posted something that directly related to something I was working on. He always has impeccable timming. I used to keep my palace for others, to have the references when students and orientees needed, or when I needed to do patient teaching. But it has become more important to me and my professional developments. Besides the list Scott has I’ve added OmniFocus and Contacts to my list as well as plain simple reminders in IOS and MacOS. If I don’t set a reminder to go back to things, I’ll forget and that PDF or web page will just get filed into a black hole. I need to get better at tagging when I save. My peripheral brain Evernote Papers 3 Contacts Reminders Inoreader (RSS app) has tons of functions Read by @QXmd The one thing I am lacking is that web interface to be able to share. We are at the spot where the software hasn’t caught up to the potential of the… Read more »

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3 years ago

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Daniel Hankins

Great cast and topic. I’m an MS2 and have gone through many resources trying to find something similar to what you discuss. One key feature that I want is the ability to cross link among many different ideas, without having to make those connections individually. For me, at the point I am in in my training, small facts are the predominant need. Making connections between those facts is what puts the big picture together. Knowing the mechanism of drug A is great, knowing how that mechanism affects drug B is not always immediately apparent. A web of linking topics that allow jumping from one to the next, seamlessly, would facilitate viewing/learning these connections. Here’s a (very) simple example: I look up drug A, it has many connections: class, mechanism, receptors, metabolism, S/E, interactions, etc. I click “Vasodilator” (the class), it moves my focus there, shows where I came from (Drug A), and shows its connections: effects, other drugs in class, etc. I click “Decreased TPR” (an effect), again it shows where I came from (Drug A: Vasodilator) and its connections: causes, effects, equation, etc I click “Decreased BP” (an effect), it shows connections: causes, effects, etc. I click “Shock” (a… Read more »

Hi Daniel, I’ve been using FreePlane to make mind maps and now I’m trying to develop something similar to what you described. I’m in the planning phase and I don’t have really that much experience in coding but it’s worth a try! If anyone knows a project that deals with a biomedical knowledge base built over available literature I’m curious to hear about it 🙂

I’ve experimented going back-and-forth between using Evernote and Google Drive. Drive is nice for the more traditional filing cabinet method, but I think Evernote is probably the closest exstant structure to the mind palace you describe. Because of its popularity, capturing web pages, PDFs, etc., is terribly easy (I have everything dump into my _inbox prior to processing), and the tagging would promote maneuverability between topics. Notebooks could be used as Chapters, Notes as topics. They also have new annotation features for adding notes, highlighting, etc., on PDFs. (Should they be paying me for this?) And like you said, it’s clunky (especially within the notes), but I wonder if that isn’t somewhat mitigated by the power of its search feature. I suppose my personal plan is to front-loading work on a structure within Evernote that would allow for easy processing of captured material.

Mark Ragoo (@markragoo) EM Consultant, Staffordshire. I’m an EM physician with a specialist interest in medical informatics. Hi Scott, you sound like you know exactly what you want. This is great because that’s mainly the biggest problem that people have when they go to talk to a developer. All you need to do is go on and build it. The features of the product that you describe will be useful to all EM academics around the world. I’m in Cape Town for ICEM2016 and one of the recognised issues for the global development of EM is knowledge translation issue. I think that we now have the tools available to solve this problem. I know a few people in the informatics world who would may interested in collaborating on project like this. One option since you already use WordPress (which is open source), would be to prototype exactly what you want and build a plugin or plugins for it giving it the features you want. Some of what you describe already exists (there is a mendeley plugin for WordPress (https://wordpress.org/plugins/mendeleyplugin/) There is a PDF embedder plugin (https://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/wordpress-viewer-plugin-embed-pdfs-powerpoint-excel-word-and-more/) Some of the more specialist stuff you would need to hire a developer to… Read more »

Hi all, I am a graduated engineer/computer scientist who afterwards did a PhD in computer science while being in medical school. As an informatics ‘nerd’ I have something similar to a mind palace since many years in terms of a version control system (I still use svn since I am too lazy to move to git but Ill do it sooner or later), but working in actual emergency medicine now I also needed some way to easily access any of my data from anywhere. For me something like wordpress will never do it, but I added owncloud to my system, which is very good and allows for many of the features you describe, and I find it much better. You can still have a webinterface where many plugins exist, its open source, and you can write some more code or plugins for things you need (if you know how to, or if you find someone who will do it for you). Could be an interesting project to write plugins for owncloud to really have a nice mindpalace… It can access directly normal folder structures on your harddrive and make available over the web directly, or on client apps (who exist… Read more »

Hi Scott,
I personally don’t find a solely web-based solution convenient, for many reasons.
The feature to have web access from anywhere in the world is nice and possibly a must,
but when I am working on my computer or at home I want to be able to work
directly with the data on the computer or at least on my local network.
For instance to do big changes or work with many or big files is just much more convenient
on a (local/lan) filesystem than over the browser.
Or things like being able to use egrep and pdfgrep on the whole mindpalace…
Can you use search functions in your wordpress system that even parse through all the actual content of
pdf’s and text files?
(well probably there are plugins for that also…)

Also in terms of security I don’t favour the complete palace being send halfway aroud the world
each time I access something.

I would feel quite restricted if I had to do all my work over the browser, but I can appreciate that for many people that might be very well acceptable!

makes sense. I should have added the one additional requirement–Need to be able to do edits/additions on firewalled computers in any computer in the hospital.

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3 years ago

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John Rozehnal

If you find yourself stuck between two platforms and/or using a suite of tools that don’t seamlessly communicate (e.g. you want to comment and store a synopsis in Evernote but you prefer to publish on WordPress), I’d recommend If This Then That (ifttt.com), which uses the APIs from various platforms to force them to play nice.

It’s a great way to use the strengths of a variety of platforms without having to duplicate your own work.

That said, I think Evernote (especially with the paid features) meets all Scott’s criteria, with the exception of full open source status.

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3 years ago

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Rob Jones

Rob Jones,
I think you would likely get more out of Evernote if you checked out an on-line course “Evernote Made Easy” by a Canadian named Steve Dotto. He does charge for his course, but I found it to be well worth it. Steve has no medical background, but definitely shows us how to accomplish most of the things you would like to build into your mind palace by using Evernote in conjunction with other software like Skitch which is a great tool to edit articles like you want, and without changing the original. This is what I use. I think you would be impressed if you had the time to put into it. It definitely takes effort, not just something you download and let it do all the work. I feel that it is worth the extra effort. I hope this helps.

[…] for anyone to store it internally. A few years ago Scott Weingart talked about a concept called the Mind palace. This concept is based on the method of loci. Latin for places, this methodology “uses […]